Enée chassant le cerf sur la côte de Libye

Claude Lorrain's Enée chassant le cerf sur la côte de Libye draws on Virgil's Aeneid, Book I, where Aeneas and his men land in Libya and hunt deer to feed their exhausted crew. Claude treated Virgilian subjects repeatedly throughout his career, and the Aeneid provided him with numerous occasions for the ideal, golden-lit Antique coastal settings in which he specialised. He was living in Rome from the 1620s onwards, surrounded by the remains of Antiquity, and his imaginative reconstructions of the classical Mediterranean landscape fused his close observation of the Roman Campagna with his reading of the ancient poets.

Golden afternoon light dissolves the middle ground in characteristic Claudian atmospheric haze, with trees framing the coastal view and figures at human scale introducing the Virgilian narrative.